One Summer: America, 1927

before the bankers arrived. News of Byrd’s splashdown at Ver-sur-Mer and triumphal reception in Paris devoured all the main news space in the papers for days, which pleased the bankers because it helped to distract attention from them. They relished secrecy.
    The host of the meeting was Benjamin Strong. Fifty-five years old, he was a tall, handsome man, but one whose life was ‘packed with secret sorrows and ill health’, to quote the financial historian John Brooks. In the summer of 1927 he wore the tired and slightly haunted look of a man who has been fighting a long, losing battle with a fatal condition. His was tuberculosis.
    Strong’s personal and professional lives made a poignant contrast. Born in 1872 into a genteel but financially diminished old upstate New York family, he could not afford college and so insteadwent to work in banking in Manhattan. Thanks to his personable manner and natural authority, he climbed steadily through the ranks, but his ascent was considerably accelerated after 1898 when he moved with his wife and young family to Englewood, New Jersey, and became friends with several rising stars at J. P. Morgan & Co., notably Henry Davison, Thomas Lamont and (later) Dwight Morrow. With the benefit of his new contacts, Strong became a director of the Bankers’ Trust Company, then president, and finally was made head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank at the time of its founding in 1913.
    His personal life, alas, did not achieve a parallel happiness. His wife, who suffered from chronic depression, killed herself in 1905, leaving him with four young children, one of whom died of scarlet fever the following year. Two years later, Strong remarried, but that marriage was not a success either: his second wife left him in 1916 and moved to California with two further children he had had with her. At the same time, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and needed to spend extended periods convalescing in the clear air of Colorado. While there, he formed a relationship with a young woman, a fellow sufferer of TB, who killed herself horribly by drinking boot polish. This was not a man for whom life was a succession of joyous events. In the summer of 1927, he had just returned to work after six months’ leave of absence.
    At least he had the companionship of his best friend, Montagu Norman of the Bank of England. Strong and Norman were so close that they frequently holidayed together, usually in Maine or the South of France. Norman made a rather odd friend, but an even odder head of a central bank. Of a fragile and nervous disposition, he was ‘a strange and lonely man’ who was ‘intensely neurotic and almost impossible to please’, in the words of two of his many biographers. He sported what Time magazine in 1927 called ‘a superbly pugnacious goatee’ and had an affection for broad-brimmed hats and flowing capes that made him look like a cross between a Middle European spy and a second-rate stage conjuror.He was fiercely anti-Semitic, which was slightly unexpected because his own roots, it was said, led back to Sephardic Jews from southern Europe.
    Among his many eccentricities, he always travelled in disguise, even when there was no plausible reason for doing so. Usually he adopted the name ‘Professor Clarence Skinner’, to the occasional consternation of the real Professor Clarence Skinner. He was much given to extravagant nervous breakdowns. Whenever he was feeling ‘seedy’, as he called it, he would take to his bed for days or even weeks. He didn’t work at all from 1911 to 1913 after the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung diagnosed him, arrestingly and erroneously, as suffering from final-stage syphilis and gave him just months to live. It is more likely that he was at least mildly bi-polar. When in ebullient mood, his confidence was boundless. ‘I don’t have reasons ,’ he once corrected a friend. ‘I have instincts.’
    Norman lived alone (but attended by seven servants) in a rambling house in Holland Park in west London; Herbert Hoover was a near neighbour for several years. He almost never gave interviews or made speeches and he rarely socialized. His house had a music room in which he sometimes held small concerts for himself alone. He came from a family of considerable accomplishment. His brother became chairman of the BBC. His father was a partner in Martin’s Bank, then one of the biggest in Britain, and both his grandfathers had been directors of the Bank of England, one